What’s a Store For?

Barneys Remakes Itself for the New New York

The new shoe floor of Barneys New York.Credit
Barbel Schmidt for The New York Times

The elevator door opened in the Sutton Place penthouse of Richard Perry, the hedge-fund manager, and there he stood in the white foyer wearing a black knit suit whose slumping shoulders made him look like a bony country parson. Perry is a man of meticulous habit, a super-athlete who prides himself on his sophisticated sense of style. He has a closetful of suits by Thom Browne and Lanvin that don’t have shoulders that slant like a roof. This one was a blip of misjudgment. But Perry, no doubt out of devotion to his wife, Lisa, a fashion designer who made the suit in the same double knit she uses for her mod dresses, decided to wear it that night. And it was an evening of some importance, for the Perrys were off to a party at Barneys — their first since Richard bought the renowned specialty store.

“Welcome! Welcome!” he boomed as I stepped off the elevator. A moment later, from the apartment’s depths, Lisa appeared, a small, sunny woman with ageless girl-next-door features and tawny hair cut in a chic mop. Lisa grew up in the north suburbs of Chicago and still retains, after more than 30 years in New York, a Midwestern accent, along with an easy friendliness. She was wearing a yellow-and-gray-print dress of her own design and high heels.

Richard was keen to show me the apartment, which is something else. It is a pure example of the Pop and neo-Pop aesthetics in that everything is magnified and lurid, like the huge Jeff Koons metallic green diamond planted on the terrace, visible from the foyer — and a source of vexation with a neighbor, who claimed the rock emits a laser-strength glare. (Richard dismisses the gripe as baseless.) The apartment is like someone’s idea in 1963 of a home of the future, down to the panoramic curve of the living room, the bottomless whiteness and the oval leather sofa large enough to seat 30. On the walls hang paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Jim Dine. It’s not a room for relaxing; even trays of hard candies, displayed with absurd precision, seem to treat enjoyment strictly as a still life.

Far from being the white elephant that some supposed when the Perrys bought the penthouse in 2000 for $10.9 million (the main drawback was its two ballrooms), the place fed new goals for the couple. Lisa, at one time an abortion-rights advocate and a Democratic fund-raiser (“I really wanted Hillary to be president,” she says, and to illustrate the couple’s regard, a portrait of Hillary by Chuck Close hangs in the apartment), had begun to collect ’60s fashion, like Courrèges. Strangers would often ask her who designed her outfit, she said, and “that’s when the light bulb went off.” By 2007, she was selling Lisa Perry creations at stores like Jeffrey and Bergdorf Goodman. She persuaded artists or their heirs, like Lichtenstein’s widow, Dorothy, to let her reproduce artwork on her designs, for a small percentage of sales (that is then donated to the artist’s cause). But she was bedeviled by the pressures of a small wholesale operation, so she decided to focus just on her shop on Madison Avenue and some kids’ clothes for Barneys. By that time, and perhaps not wholly coincidentally, Richard had bought a large amount of Barneys’ debt. He had also endorsed his wife’s Pop aesthetic, buying all the biggest art guns. It astonished Lisa how far he went. She said: “I was going to do Pop Art lite, I call it — stuff that looked like Pop Art. Warholesque.” She laughed at how this sounded. She said that it was the analyst in her husband that made him want to dig deep, “whether it’s a company, whatever it is.” Before their Pop Art phase, they collected French Empire antiques, and Richard would crawl under tables to see how they were put together. The apartment makes Lisa happy, but she admitted: “I even walk around saying, ‘Do I really live here?’ I did not grow up like this.” Richard described his art foray in candy-store terms, saying he went through a book on Pop Art and said, “I’ll take this, this and this.” But that’s a typical bit of Perry swagger. (If he made the gluttonous “this and this” comment, the art adviser Dominique Levy, who has worked with the Perrys for a decade, said it was not to her, and that Perry pushed to make unexpected choices.)

He said, “Did you know that Koons considers it a symbol of human creation?”

Lisa laughed tensely. “Richard, I don’t think Jeff meant — ”

“No, no, it’s interesting,” he said, springing into a description of how the prongs were sperm attacking the ovum. When he finished he bent his head toward me and, with a sheepish grin, said, “I’m a little bit of a nerd.”

We settled into the small library, where the books were arranged by color, for a drink before going to the party. I wanted to know what Richard thought of Barneys’ newly renovated first floor, which replaced the elegant, residential feel of Peter Marino’s original concept with a sleek design marked off by handbag-filled shelves. Because Richard’s hedge fund, Perry Capital, closed on the deal to acquire Barneys New York from Istithmar World, Dubai’s sovereign wealth fund, in early May, he had no input in this remodel, nor in the new shoe floor that replaced the once-intimate wood-paneled salon. The changes were initiated by Barneys’ C.E.O., Mark Lee, who arrived in September 2010, after running Gucci, and by the creative director Dennis Freedman, formerly of W magazine and a longtime friend of Lee’s, who is in charge of windows and other visuals. Critics complained that Barneys was now merely offering the traditional menu of the globalized mercantile world, with its buffet of high-margin shoes and bags. Among the descriptions I heard were that the new Barneys looked like a mall or a duty-free shop. “It looks like Macy’s but a bit more high-end,” Ronnie Cooke Newhouse, creative director at Barneys in the early ’90s, told me, adding, “It’s so out of step with where things are going.”

When I asked Richard what he thought of the main floor, his face and lips grew rigid, as though something unpleasant-tasting were being offered to him. Puzzled, I glanced at Lisa, who glanced at Richard, then back to me and said: “Look at him, you freaked him out! He won’t even speak now.” She said to me, seriously, “I think it’s a really good question.”

Richard remained stone-faced on the divan. Finally, I realized that it wasn’t the question but my turning on the tape recorder that had unnerved him. “Do you want me to turn it off?” I asked.

His wife smiled at him. “You’ll feel better, sweetie.”

And he said, sulkily, “Lisa can talk.”

“No, we want your input, too,” she said.

I turned off the recorder and got out my notebook.

Immediately his face relaxed and he spoke freely, excitedly. Sure, bags are profitable, he said, but look how they have become these highly sought-after objects. They deserve to be presented in a gallery, which in his view is what the main floor resembles.

He smiled. “I think bags are the most beautiful art in the market today.”

It was nearly 9 p.m. when we pulled up to Barneys (the Perrys’ 26-year-old son, David, rode with us; their other child, David’s twin, Samantha, arrived later). Several store executives, including Lee and Freedman, were waiting on the sidewalk to greet the Perrys. The purpose of the party was to kick off windows that Freedman had conceived with Dakis Joannou, a Greek art patron. Each one featured an artist’s impression of the fashion world. Juergen Teller’s giant portrait of an aging Yves Saint Laurent brutally reduced the king to a coifed has-been. Another artist, John Bock, was already upstairs at the restaurant Freds creating one-off garments from old clothes.

Stepping out of the car, the Perrys embraced the artist Leo Villareal and his wife, Yvonne Force Villareal. Leo said, “So this is your baby!” Richard grinned, and started for the door.

“Who’s the guy with the bangs?” he asked, pausing. I told him it was the fashion photographer Vinoodh Matadin, who had come to the party with his wife and partner, Inez van Lamsweerde. After being introduced, Lisa said, “I’m such a fan of your work.” Van Lamsweerde looked blankly after the man in the strange knit suit. When I explained that he’d just bought Barneys, she said, “Oh!”

Upstairs, the party was in full roar. At Bock’s platform, a crowd stood transfixed by his assemblages. “This is great,” Richard said, delighted. “This is the kind of thing we should be doing.” Later, meeting Teller, he told the photographer, at ease in red shorts and a bulky sweater, that his Y.S.L. image reminded him of the ’60s nouveaux-réalistes, like Jacques de la Villeglé, who used torn street posters in his work. To which Teller replied, impassively, “Oh, yeah?”

Around 10:30, the Perrys decided to leave. Crossing the main floor, we passed a wall of shelves. And Lisa said, “You know, it is a sea of bags.” She turned to her husband and repeated the remark.

Photo

Richard and Lisa Perry in their Pop Art apartment.Credit
Barbel Schmidt for The New York Times

But Richard, in full stride, said, “I think they’re beautiful.”

Barney Pressman opened his men’s clothing shop in 1923, the same year that his son, Fred, was born. By opening a tiny store on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, an area of warehouses and stinking abattoirs that was losing residents while much of the rest of the city boomed, Barney was truly taking the long view. The good shopping was around Herald Square, at Macy’s and Gimbels, or at B. Altman’s and later Saks on Fifth Avenue; and there were dozens of well-established haberdashers, like Brooks Brothers, Weber & Heilbroner and John David, that could outfit a man in style. Leading suit manufacturers, like Hickey Freeman and Oxxford, did not care to sell to Barney; for one thing, he undercut their retail prices. So he went around them. He bought suits from stores in the South and then would replace the famous labels with his own, enraging the manufacturers even more. He sold thousands of bootleg suits. There was an audacity about Barney. Stenciled on his window, almost overlooked for the profusion of suits, homburgs, and walking sticks, were the words “For the Man Who Knows.” Men went to Barneys for quality and price, even if some fibbed to their friends that their suits came from Saks.

When Barney retired, in 1975, annual revenues were nearly $35 million, according to Joshua Levine’s history, “The Rise and Fall of the House of Barneys,” and Fred had put Barneys on the high road, selling pricey Brioni suits and other wonders of Italian design. In the story of Barneys, Fred, who died in 1996, tends to be overshadowed by his sons, Gene and Bob, who became much more visible from the mid-’80s until its bankruptcy in 1996. But Fred is the one who made the name synonymous with New York savvy.

“I was taught by my father — there was no better merchant on the planet,” Gene said when we met over a drink at the Four Seasons. “Nothing was ever good enough.” He was wearing jeans, a white button-down and a tan Belvest jacket custom-made for his dad in the ’80s. He still had the immense self-assurance that struck some as arrogant and others as inspiring when he was running Barneys. (“I don’t care what people think. I care about what I think.”) He removed his jacket and tossed it over the back of the banquette.

Belvest is a small Italian firm that Fred came across in the early ’70s. It was Belvest — with fabrics selected by Fred — that Giorgio Armani used in 1976 to make the first unconstructed suits he sold in the United States exclusively at Barneys. This was before anyone had heard of Armani, and it was Fred who told him what he wanted for his customers, who picked the swatches, and then had him sign an exclusive for future products. When Armani’s relaxed look became a sensation, Barneys was the only store that carried the clothes, and, needless to say, this had a huge impact on Fred’s business. Exclusives were not unusual — they make a store unique, and if done properly, they allow a merchant to control his prices — but Fred’s level of involvement was unusual. He prescribed the cuts he wanted. If he thought a suit’s lapels were too wide, he told the manufacturer how much to trim them. In the ’60s, he began in earnest to seek out family-run firms in Italy like Piatelli that made fine, hand-tailored garments. He did the same with makers of shirts, ties and gloves. He went to France and England, repeating the search. Fred could be stunningly single-minded, and that may explain his own disheveled appearance — “a miracle of shabby chic,” Simon Doonan, Barneys’ former window dresser turned roving ambassador, once said. For a good decade, Fred had Europe virtually to himself, since most of his competitors sold only American-made suits. But Fred believed strongly that it was his job, or his buyers’, to guide his customers’ tastes, which in the ’60s were evolving anyway. This decision was good for business, but it also reflected his view that beautiful things, in addition to giving a sophisticated appearance, could expand your horizon. A comment you hear over and over, from vendors to salesmen, is how much they learned from Fred.

Barneys was still primarily a men’s store in the late ’70s, when Gene introduced women’s fashion. Shortly after that, his mother, Phyllis, started selling housewares and antiques in a section called Chelsea Passage. After that, the store rapidly evolved into a cool downtown alternative to glitzier stores like Bergdorf’s. Gene continued to observe Fred’s mantra about exclusives. He snagged Azzedine Alaïa, the Tunisian-born designer who was dressing Grace Jones and every hot model and editor in skintight black outfits, and later, an unknown Miuccia Prada, who was transforming her family’s leather-goods business with her sexy-dowdy fashion. In 1986, Barneys opened its new women’s store, with its majestic staircase, and Gene hired Doonan to perform his window magic. As far as Gene was concerned, the freakier the displays, the better. “My thing was to just aggravate and shake things up,” Gene said. But these changes can scarcely explain the tremendous shift in the ’80s. After all, Barneys didn’t pioneer interesting store design. And New Yorkers had already been entertained by Marvin Traub’s extravagant productions at Bloomingdale’s, by the brilliant windows of Robert Currie at Bendel’s and Lynn Hershman at Bonwit Teller (where famously a mannequin was posed with her hand crashing through the glass, as if wanting to join the action outside).

Without taking anything away from the atmosphere that the Pressmans created in the ’80s, the frenzy had a lot to do with demographics: namely, the rise of the yuppie. Gene would no doubt hate the tag and, on the face of it, it seems loony hanging on an Alaïa or a Prada. But New York at the time was being defined by its “arrogant, smart children,” in the words of James B. Lindheim, a marketing executive (and later the chairman of Burson-Marsteller), in a 1975 article in Harper’s. Unlike previous generations, this new class, Lindheim said, would seek to define itself by what it consumed — be it contemporary art or dead-chic black. And Barneys was their store.

Like Doonan’s windows, Barneys ads in the late ’80s and ’90s had a topical flavor and caught the ironic, self-involved tone of the city’s new art stars and Wall Street millionaires. (In one of Jean-Philippe Delhomme’s serial illustrations for a 1993 catalog, the scene is a cocktail party, with the typical line: “Raoul was the perfect host, but Eleanor owned everything.”) Ronnie Newhouse, part of the team behind those witty ads, told me that Gene “always wanted to push things. ‘Oh, that’s boring. Anyone can do that. Come back to me with a better idea.’ ” There was a distinct sense of connoisseurship, of people cultivating less a style than an identity based on style theories, like the minimalism of Helmut Lang or the bag-lady chic of Comme des Garçons. It was ripe for parody. I laughed when Newhouse reminded me that “Barneys was always the store for people who didn’t like color.”

I asked Newhouse what she thought made the store different.

She said: “It was very attached to a New York culture, in the same way that Woody Allen was in film. It was kind of the sense that the customers were the enlightened New Yorkers. At the time, Bergdorf’s felt like a store for uptown doctors’ wives, and Barneys was where the cool people shopped, and the cultural elite. People in the know.”

In 1999, after 76 years of ownership, the Pressmans lost their store in spectacular fashion: in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, after getting into a fight with their Japanese partner, who had financed a multimillion-dollar expansion in the early ’90s, which included the Madison Avenue store and branches in Chicago and Beverly Hills. Since then, Gene Pressman hasn’t had much to do with Barneys, and over our drink he said it was hard to talk about the store. “I’ve known Mark Lee a long time, and I like Mark a lot,” he said. “He’s a bright guy. He has great respect for the family and has been kind to me. He has a vision for Barneys, and I guess time will tell.” Gene had not met Perry. “I would assume he’s not pretending to be a merchant.” It’s clear, though, that Gene is keeping an eye on what happens at the store. He said, “Just because somebody goes and builds a big shoe floor, and then the next guy goes and builds a bigger shoe floor, is not reinventing yourself.”

I asked him about the Barneys windows. To many, last year’s Lady Gaga holiday theme was a sellout. (Or as a former executive said, “Two years too late,” adding: “The Barneys customer doesn’t want a Lady Gaga Christmas ornament for $50. They don’t care. They want beautiful things.”) Nevertheless, the store moved some 90,000 Gaga products, and Lee says traffic led to record December sales.

Still, the windows and the stripping away of the architectural character are perhaps the biggest source of complaint about the store’s new direction. Last year, Tim Howe, the visual director of the Chicago store, quit, convinced that the creative and communal atmosphere of the company had wilted under Lee and Freedman. Howe told me that the visual brief from Lee was to get rid of the wacky or snarky tone and make things cleaner.

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That was fine, Howe said, “but there wasn’t this infusion of a new creativity or vision. How are we going to set ourselves apart?” Howe, who, like other visual managers in the branches, was used to an open, weekly exchange with the New York staff, said that he never had a conversation with Freedman. “My perception was he didn’t know how to relate to us,” Howe said. He found the Gaga choice “embarrassing,” and he said: “The beauty of Barneys was that it had a small-store mentality; it was allowed to do things that were different and creative. It was the last holdout.”

Gene wonders if the whole idea of the professionally dressed, creative window isn’t tired at this point. “If I had a store again, I wouldn’t have windows,” he said. “My windows would be looking into the store. Because I’m done with hip windows. There’s nothing else you can do. I would be thinking about the energy from within, about creating environments, seeing hot people.”

He paused, musing. “A store once famous for windows — no more windows — that’s definitely different enough.”

Shortly after Perry took control of Barneys in May, I met him in the offices of Perry Capital, in the General Motors Building in Midtown. He founded the hedge fund in 1988, after more than a decade at Goldman Sachs, where he was a Robert Rubin protégé. Over the next 20 years, his fund returned an annual average of 15.4 percent. Early in the subprime-mortgage crisis, he and his investors reaped a return of $1 billion by shorting subprime securities. He’s an opportunistic investor with a contrarian streak: “Everything that people hate, I buy,” he told me.

Then in the fall of 2008, right after Fortune magazine ran a glowing profile in which Perry discussed his investment strategy, the world changed. That year Perry’s fund dropped 27 percent, mostly because of a position it had taken in Volkswagen. It became clear to him that huge economic currents could easily swamp the bottom-line value analysis he had used so successfully since his days at Goldman. Over the next few years, Perry made an all-out effort to understand the European debt crisis and its investment impact. He went to London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, speaking to bankers and politicians; he reckons he knows more people in the German Bundestag than in the U.S. Congress. Today, Perry Capital has positions in A.I.G., a Texas utility, an Icelandic bank and a German apartment complex, among other securities. Its year-to-date return is about 12.5 percent.

When Perry greeted me that afternoon at his office, he wore a gorgeous slate-gray Lanvin suit with a white Thom Browne button-down and a narrow silver-striped tie, and on his sockless feet were moccasins. Even when he was at Goldman he displayed a well-developed sense of style that made him an anomaly at the bank. He slouched in his chair, his gaze direct. Although famously press-shy, he filled the next two and a half hours with lively and at times confessional talk — about his childhood, his career, his opinions on fashion. We met on three more occasions, and each time he made a conscientious effort to explain himself or a point.

Born in Los Angeles, the second of three children, Perry spent his boyhood in Chicago, where his father ran a company that made photocopiers and other office equipment. The family then moved to New York. When he was 13, his parents divorced. In the few interviews Perry has given, the subject of financial hardship comes up with a sense of deliberateness. Not that he was impoverished — he graduated from Milton Academy and the Wharton School, and his uncle is James Cayne, the former C.E.O. of Bear Stearns — but h­e did work in a movie theater after his father cut him off, and he later earned his M.B.A. at night at New York University. He seems to want to connect to a sense of struggle. On his library walls are iconic images of the civil rights movement, of the Freedom Riders, and he has visited the route of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, as well as countries with a history of human rights abuses. (“Some people go to South Africa for safari; I went to study apartheid,” he says.) He believes his success is the result of his own hard work and intelligence. “Whether it’s right or wrong,” he once told me, “I think differently than anyone else I know. If I listen to a management presentation, I get to what I consider the essential fact. And I often get to a very different fact than what other people get to.”

An investor who knows Perry agrees.“He’s done it on his terms,” he told me. “He hasn’t compromised who he is. He’s still the same guy he was 30 years ago. He’s smart. He’s kind of goofy. He talks too loud, he laughs too loud. He hasn’t modulated any of those things, which is likable. He lets his wife enjoy this fantasy existence of a 1960s sensibility. He looks like this uncomfortable person in the middle of this stage set of an apartment. He’s been pretty shrewd about the value of art.” But about Barneys, the investor wondered aloud, “Does Richard have the gumption and expertise to really do the hard things to manage it?”

Photo

The Barneys management team, from left: Daniella Vitale, Mark Lee and Dennis Freedman.Credit
Barbel Schmidt for The New York Times

Maybe the most surprising thing about Perry’s involvement in Barneys is that he got involved at all. His firm hasn’t made other high-end retail investments. In fact, Perry thinks luxury retail is a bad business for most investors — too many risks, too many divas. But more than that, he said, “I would have thought it was vanity. And I think if you look at my career, I avoid vanity.”

But to hear Perry tell it, the decision to trade in Barneys’ debt was a straightforward one: here was an overleveraged asset whose name made it a minimal investment risk. If he wound up owning the asset for a few hundred million dollars — roughly his debt position — he could eventually sell it for a lot more. No matter how difficult the retail environment, there would always be someone who wanted to own Barneys for the right price. “My thinking wasn’t much more profound than that,” he said.

In 2007, Istithmar acquired Barneys for $942 million in a bidding contest with Fast Retailing, the Japanese company that owns Uniqlo. The colossal sum reflected the rage for luxury goods and the Dubai firm’s belief that it could open Barneys stores in global cities like Beijing. These were shaky suppositions. Only three years before, Jones Apparel Group had paid just $400 million for Barneys. Even if the company’s value could be increased, Istithmar had borrowed nearly $500 million to finance the deal. Perry’s purchase of roughly $300 million in Barneys’ credit gave him control of the debt and therefore, potentially, the equity if Istithmar decided to unload Barneys. “That’s kind of the way it played,” said an executive involved in Barneys during the Jones era. “From what I know, Richard played a very calculated and brilliant strategy.” (The other major debt holder was Ronald Burkle’s firm, the Yucaipa Companies, whose stake was somewhat smaller, though many believed Burkle was also keen to own Barneys.) In any case, by 2009, Istithmar’s problems were compounded by Dubai’s exploding debt crisis. As an executive then working at the struggling store said, “We were a pimple on their butt in comparison.”

As the recession cut into property values and 401(k)’s, stores became ghost towns. Istithmar had been unable to lure a new chief for Barneys since the departure of its former C.E.O., Howard Socol. For two years the store was run by Istithmar executives in conjunction with a seven-member management team, most from the Pressman era, who naturally felt protective of the Barneys legacy. Their biggest concerns were getting rid of excess inventory and maintaining enough cash to stay liquid. To stay on top of the crisis in 2009, the team convened war-room-style meetings almost daily. During one period, when several factoring companies briefly ordered vendors to stop shipping to Barneys out of fear that it couldn’t pay, the mood in the meetings was particularly tense, with bankruptcy counsel on standby on at least one occasion. A former executive said: “Frankly, being shut down [by the factors] saved us. We got out of the inventory. We had to be incredibly nimble.”

Perry, meanwhile, was brazen in his demands, according to several former executives who declined to speak on the record. “Basically he was looking into the creditor agreements and trying to find every possible way to throw the asset into bankruptcy,” the former executive said. “He would ask for reappraisals of the inventory. Every time he zigged, we had to zag.”

Perry doesn’t deny that he put pressure on Barneys. “Yes, it was pressure,” he said. “In hindsight, they didn’t understand their credit agreements. And if they didn’t have someone like me to come to, they would have gone into bankruptcy.” He said that in addition to annual interest of more than $50 million, Barneys had roughly $150 million due this past fall. “So where’s the sponsor? It wasn’t going to happen. Because they couldn’t make it happen.” He went on, “There was a very pleasant understanding between us and them once they realized it was game over.”

Another former executive said, “His attitude was basically, ‘You guys will never be able to make it work, so why don’t you just hand over the company.’ He was a bit pompous.” By spring 2012, the deal was done. Burkle received cash plus 20 percent in equity and a board seat. (“He’s been completely pleasant,” Perry said.) Istithmar got about 8 percent equity and a board seat, so it still had something to show for its involvement. And Barneys was able to shed all but $50 million of its long-term debt.

“Richard looks like the savior of Barneys,” said that same former executive. “And the irony is there was nothing wrong with the company.” There’s some truth to this: Barneys may have needed a cash infusion, or to restructure its debt, and certainly the Madison Avenue store was overdue for a face lift, but many of the woes caused by the financial crisis had lifted by 2010 as people began to shop again.

This fall, six months after the deal went through, Lisa’s designs appeared in one of the windows at Barneys. When I asked Richard about the appearance of a conflict of interest, he was quick to rationalize that it wasn’t favoritism since his wife’s clothes were sold at Barneys before he bought it. He said, “Listen, if it turns out Lisa’s line is not doing well, I think Daniella” — Barneys’ C.O.O. and top merchant, Daniella Vitale­ — “will have a tough conversation with her.”

He dismisses as “laughable” the idea that he bought the store for Lisa. But it’s possible that the Barneys purchase involves vanity of another kind: that Perry wants to be lionized for turning around a New York institution. “I think that may be what he aspires to,” says an investor who knows him. “He certainly could have sold his position in the company. . . . He was approached by a lot of private-equity guys.”

Great stores reflect the cultural life and aesthetic priorities of a city. For the 75 years that the Pressmans ran Barneys, their energies flowed in time with New York — the crazy maneuverings of Barney, the postwar expansiveness of Fred, the arrogance of Gene. Now comes the age of Richard Perry. What will his Barneys look like?

To be sure, there is an awful lot Perry doesn’t know about high-end retailing. His insights into fashion and store management have accrued mainly as a shopper. “The whole Exclusively Ours, the XO idea”— a program of Barneys-only labels started by Lee — “is where I think we’re going more and more,” he told me. “Lisa and I were at Colette, and she bought a bag that was exclusively Colette. That’s why she bought it.” He paused, as if the purchase in the clutter-free Paris shop evoked a thought. “It’s not easy to go to these shows and curate and pick out the right things. It’s actually very hard.”

But Perry is a very involved owner, visiting the store four or five times a week. He pushed to give Freds, a popular lunch spot, a locavore twist at night to draw a bigger crowd. This past summer he organized a two-day “odyssey” to California, so that he, Lee and Vitale could learn the latest e-commerce technology. (The company’s Web site had been neglected for years, but after a revamp this past May, traffic is up 34 percent, and Lee says that Barneys.com will soon overtake the Beverly Hills store as the second-largest revenue producer after Madison Avenue.) Lee called Perry “a worthy owner-patron of Barneys,” and said: “It would be much harder if someone said, ‘We should put sneakers on the ground floor because we could sell a lot of Keds.’ That would be a problem.”

When I asked Perry whom he trusts for information about the industry, he identified Lee, Vitale and his wife. He’s certainly loyal. Lee and Vitale, another Gucci alumna, are both well regarded, but I wondered how he could be so sure his managers were as good as he thinks they are. He said he had hired a top consultant to evaluate them. “Barneys has the highest expert score of any company he’s looked at,” Perry said in earnest. “He told me he had never seen scores like this.” But scores can’t account for instinct. Lee and Vitale missed the boat on one of the most anticipated lines of the year: Raf Simons’s debut collection for Dior. Simons, a 44-year-old Belgian, had attracted notice for his modern tailoring and colors at Jil Sander, and insiders knew he had the maturity to take over a big French house. The head of another New York store told me, “We knew this was going to be big.” Lee explained in an e-mail in late October that Barneys has tended to focus on smaller European companies, like Lanvin and Givenchy, rather than the goliaths like Dior. But when I saw the Barneys team at the Paris ready-to-wear shows in September, they were champing to get Simons’s collection. Bergdorf’s and Saks will have it instead.

Perry’s arrival poses an even more fundamental question: What are stores for today? He takes ownership at a critical time for luxury retail, when stores are trying to figure out the relationship between e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar locations, and customers seem to bounce back and forth between wanting to price-hunt designer brands online and wanting to have the singular experience that a well-run store can provide. But Perry seems interested in the challenge. “The reason I didn’t want to sell it,” he said, “is that in all aspects of where retailing is headed in the future — Barneys is there. It has the in-store experience, Freds, the new shoe floor, everyone, men and women, trying on shoes together, the furniture is cool.” He believes that Barneys can be a $1 billion business, with the Web as the key driver. “In terms of the future of where e-commerce is going,” he told me in November, “I don’t think anyone’s started yet.”

It stands to reason that in the post-recession, post-postmodern era, when a lot of consumers just want what they want — without irony, without attitude, without too many barriers — that Barneys is once again reflecting the city. More and more of the shoppers you see on Madison Avenue or in the department stores are tourists. And maybe to appeal to them, Barneys must be a little less quirky and provocative and local, and more of an accessible global brand with a glossy emporium. At least that seems to be the thinking of the current management. And there are some indications that this approach is starting to pay off: company revenues in the most recent fiscal year were over $750 million, and Lee says that earnings are in line to return shortly to historic 2007 levels (which other sources put at $77 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization). The Madison Avenue store now carries 1,800 different units of leather accessories (though not all displayed at once), a number that, as Lee said, reflects today’s reality: “Every inch counts.” Annual sales of those accessories have doubled to nearly $8,000 per square foot — another sign that Lee is giving consumers what they want.

But Barneys has never been about giving customers what they want. It has been about educating, expanding horizons, presenting the unexpected. “If you give your customers what they want, then you die,” Gene said. “The fact is they don’t know what they want.” Finding out what they want is one reason people still go to stores. One doesn’t search Amazon for ideas and inspiration.

Of all the ideas I heard in the course of my reporting, only Gene’s notion of open windows tingled with 21st-century possibility. It was one of those gateway ideas that immediately set off other thoughts: If Barneys had windows that allowed you to look right into the store, what new form would the interior take? What kinds of merchandise would be offered, and how? Would the stale trappings of luxury be stripped away? Would the stage be set for a new kind of experience? Beyond products and windows, that is what a store is for.

He may not be a retail savant like Gene Pressman, but Perry is a quick study. One day in July we were talking about the Paris haute couture shows, and Simons’s debut at Dior, when he said: “I thought it was great. I talked to Mark yesterday, and I didn’t get the feeling he was blown away by it. I looked at the dresses that Raf chose, and it seemed that it was right in line with what he should have done for his first collection.” My ears perked up: So Perry was aiming high. Was that instinct? A few days later, I spoke to the chief of another New York store, who said: “Barneys should be thinking of a big French brand that can go up against Chanel. Why not? There’s an opportunity there.”